A portion of the disclosure of the patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The owner, International Business Machines Corporation, has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by any one of the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent files of records of any country, but otherwise reserves all rights whatsoever.
This application is related to a copending application entitled Dynamically Generated HTML Formatted Reports, filed on even date herewith, which is incorporated herein by reference, in its entirety.
1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of computer data communications and more specifically to a method and system for providing dynamically generated Hyper Text Markup Language (xe2x80x9cHTMLxe2x80x9d) formatted reports from large amounts of data which is extracted from a Standard Query Language (xe2x80x9cSQLxe2x80x9d) database. The predominant current usage of the present inventive HTML formatted reports navigation method is in the customized generation of, and navigation between, reports over the internet, or like data communications channels.
2. Background Art
One of the uses to which the internet is applied is the querying of data bases which are available over the internet. The accessing of data bases over the internet presents some problems that are not present when a user accesses a data base directly at a local computer. Primary among these is that connection time must be limited over the internet in order to maximize the available bandwidth of the server, internet service provider (xe2x80x9cISPxe2x80x9d) facilities, network communications means, and the like.
One method that has been used in the prior art to use a common gateway interface (xe2x80x9cCGIxe2x80x9d) program to query the database and to produce a report which is then returned to the requesting user. This method is, however, slow and requires a great deal of processing time. Moreover, once a report is generated it must either be kept in the server""s memory (which will require a very great amount of storage space when many such custom reports are generated) or else the entire process will have to be repeated each time such a report is requested.
A copending patent application entitled DYNAMICALLY GENERATED HTML FORMATTED REPORTS teaches a method and system for creating intermediate files which are extracted from a data base to contain only the information needed to generate a particular report or section of reports. This both decreases the delay when such reports are requested (since there is no need to search the entire data base to obtain the information) and decreases the storage capacity required in the server as compared to pregeneration and storage of the required reports. This improvement itself, however, raises several questions about when such reports should be generated, how long (if at all) they should be stored once generated, and how to efficiently navigate between such reports without unnecessarily repeating any of the operations necessary to generate such reports.
It would desirable to have a met hod and system by which the viewing and navigation of such reports over the internet could be improved and/or optimized. However, to the inventor""s knowledge no such has existed in the prior art.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a method for efficiently viewing and navigating between dynamically generated HTML pages.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a method for viewing reports over the internet which requires a minimal amount of repetitive computation.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a method for navigating between HTML pages over the internet which will not require excessive storage space in a server.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a method for viewing and navigating between dynamically generated HTML pages which is simple and easy to use by an end user.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a method for viewing and navigating between dynamically generated HTML reports which is flexible such that different types of data can be efficiently retrieved.
Briefly, the inventive method operates within a system wherein the data extraction/processing step is separated from the report formatting step by adding an intermediate step to write the culled data into what is called a xe2x80x98intermediate filesxe2x80x99, which use a meta language to describe the data. Then, on demand, a variety of HTML page reports can be dynamically generated by parsing the metadata statements and data from the intermediate files. All subsequent requests to view these reports are dynamically generated from the intermediate files. The metadata statements efficiently describe the data, in that multiple reports may be generated from a set of metadata statements. Such intermediate files require far less storage space in the server than would be required to store pregenerated reports. However, the provision of the intermediate files will greatly enhance performance when a report is requested, since it will not be necessary to query the entire database to obtain the information necessary to generate the report.
According to the present invention, speed of delivery of an initial report is improved by decreasing the parsing required to produce an initial report. Further, speed of delivery of subsequent reports is decreased by minimizing required reparsing of the intermediate files, and navigation between the reports and other resources is made more efficient by dynamically updating URL addresses and/or parameters.
In addition, in the example of the invention described herein, the intermediate files may be parsed either to generate input to a charting facility or to generate input to download Comma Separated Variable (xe2x80x9cCSVxe2x80x9d) file for a table. The file can then be input to other commonly available charting applications or data formatting programs which use the CSV format files.
An advantage of the present invention is that the amount of server storage capacity that is required in order to quickly provide data base reports is reduced.
A further advantage of the present invention is that the speed of producing reports is increased as compared to culling the required data from the data base upon each request therefor.
Still another advantage of the present invention is that data base information from essentially any type of data base can be made available to essentially any desired user over the internet.
These and other objects and advantages of the present invention will become clear to those skilled in the art in view of the description of the best presently known mode of carrying out the invention and the industrial applicability of the preferred embodiment as described herein and as illustrated in the several figures of the drawing.